November 11, 1980

For Susan Sontag, the Illusions of the 60's Have Been Dissipated

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

he sensibility that resides in this particular town house
is an eclectic one indeed. Although the 8,000-book library,
neatly arranged by historical epoch from the Egyptians and
Greeks through Fascism and Communism, encompasses the
disciplines of philosophy, literature and history, the
walls are adorned with artifacts from popular culture -
photographs of Greta Garbo and Gary Cooper and Fred
Astaire, and a large pop art poster of a typewriter. The
record collection spans Wagner to the Beatles, Schubert to
Patti Smith. Over Susan Sontag's desk hang the pictures of
five writers she admires and who presumably serve as her
resident muses: Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Simone Weil,
Virginia Woolf and the critic Walter Benjamin.

At the age of 47, Miss Sontag is still preoccupied with the
questions that have animated her writing from the beginning
- the relation of the esthetic and the ethical, the
shifting boundaries between popular culture and ''high''
art, and the meaning of ''the modern.'' As she discusses
her latest book, ''Under the Sign of Saturn'' - a
collection of essays recently published by Farrar Straus &
Giroux - her low, resonant voice glides from subject to
subject, emending phrases for precision and effect. Strewn
with literary allusions and quotations, her conversation,
like her essays, resembles an ongoing interior dialogue.

Intellectual Celebrity

In the early 60's, when Miss Sontag first began writing
such essays as the famous ''Notes on Camp'' in Partisan
Review, she quickly achieved a kind of intellectual
celebrity. To many, she seemed the very avatar of radical
intellectual taste, and she was heralded in the press as
''the Natalie Wood of the U.S. Avant-Garde'' and as Mary
McCarthy's successor as the ''Dark Lady of American
Letters.'' Concerned with the underlying structures of
thought, her essays were influenced by the French
intellectual tradition, and in turn were influential in
shaping contemporary criticism. For instance, in ''Against
Interpretation,'' one of the most important and widely read
critical documents of the 60's, she defined a new formal
estheticism, arguing that art and morality have no common
ground, that it is style, not content, that matters most of
all.

Although she maintains that her current attitudes are not
inconsistent with her former positions, Miss Sontag's views
have undergone a considerable evolution over the last
decade and a half. In 1965, her celebration of style at the
expense of moral analysis led her to declare that Leni
Riefenstahl's Nazi films ''The Triumph of the Will'' and
''Olympiad'' were ''masterpieces.'' ''Because they project
the complex movements of intelligence and grace and
sensuousness,'' she wrote, ''these two films transcend the
categories of propaganda or even reportage.'' In an essay
in her new book, however, she attacks ''Triumph of the
Will,'' calling it ''a film whose very conception negates
the possibility of the filmmaker's having an esthetic
conception independent of propaganda.''

Exactly what brought about this change? ''I've become more
aware of what a historical perspective brings,'' she said.
''A decade-long residence in the 60's, with its inexorable
conversion of moral and political radicalisms into 'style,'
has convinced me of the perils of overgeneralizing the
esthetic view of the world.''

Political Views Changed, Too

Her political views too, it seems, have experienced a
similar sea change. A decade ago, she was speaking at
Students for a Democratic Society rallies, demonstrating
against the Vietnam War, and making such observations as,
''the white race is the cancer of human history.'' But in
the recent Presidential election Miss Sontag was engaged in
what she called ''the most minimal political aspiration of
all - hoping that Carter would be re-elected.'' And,
looking back at the 1960's, she feels that ''while the
justice of the protests (against the war) was undeniable,
there were also illusions and misconceptions about what was
possible in the rest of the world.''

''It was not so clear to many of us as we talked of
American imperialism how few options many of these
countries had except for Soviet imperialism, which was
maybe worse,'' she went on. ''When I was in Cuba and North
Vietnam, it was not clear to me then that they would become
Soviet satellites, but history has been very cruel and the
options available to these countries were fewer than we had
hoped. It's become a lot more complicated.''

But if politics are more complicated now, Miss Sontag feels
that at least the climate for artistic creation has
improved: ''We now have a situation where people are denied
the hectic consolations of being part of movements,'' she
said. ''Now there are just individuals doing their work.
That's important. The people whose work is very good are
usually people who are very singleminded, who are quite
separate. Kafka said once you could never be too alone to
write, and in the end the life of a writer is very
solitary.''

Work-Oriented Life

In Miss Sontag's case, the life is not exactly solitary -
she spends the hours when she is not at the typewriter
going to movies and rock concerts - but it is willfully
work-oriented nonetheless. Somehow the work and the play
eventually become one: she has said she can appreciate a
Patti Smith concert because she has read Nietzsche, and no
doubt one day Patti Smith will appear in one of her
philosophical essays.

Because she is a slow, painstaking writer - some of the
pieces in ''Under the Sign of Saturn'' took as long as a
year to write - Miss Sontag feels anxious when she is not
working. She always worries, she says, that there is not
enough time. That sense of urgency, of course, was further
heightened several years ago when she learned that she had
cancer. Although her prognosis is now quite bright, in the
beginning it was not, and she says she felt she had
''crossed some threshold in relation to death.'' ''Death
becomes quite real to you,'' she explains, ''and you never
return to that more innocent relation to life you had
before. It really makes having priorities and trying to
follow them very real to you.''

In both her writing and in person, Miss Sontag has always
been reluctant to discuss herself. She has a strong sense
of privacy, she says, and she has only recently begun,
shyly and tentatively, to use autobiographical material in
some of her short stories. Like most writers, however, she
projects her own temperament into her work and that
temperament has determined, to a great degree, what she has
chosen to write about.

'The Saturnine Personality'

In the title essay of her new book, for instance, she
describes ''the saturnine personality'' as someone
afflicted by melancholy, someone who possesses ''a
self-conscious and unforgiving relation to the self.'' He
who lives under the sign of Saturn, she writes, tends to be
''analytic,'' ''solitary,'' ''fiercely serious'' and
''condemned to work.'' The essay was written as a portrait
of Walter Benjamin, but it could well serve as one of Susan
Sontag herself. ''I felt I was describing myself,'' she
said. ''I'm trying to tell the truth, but of course I know
I am drawn to the part of people that reminds me of
myself.''

Miss Sontag says that she writes out of her own obsessions
- in the case of ''On Photography,'' her preoccupation with
images and their meaning; in ''Illness as Metaphor,'' her
own experience with cancer. Because she regards writing as
a means of ''getting rid of something,'' its effects are
almost therapeutic. ''It feels hygienic,'' she says. ''I
feel I'm finally free of those obsessions and free to go on
to other things.''

Throughout her work, in fact, there is a theme of
transcendence, of overcoming history, both personal and
cultural. In the well-known essay, ''The Esthetics of
Silence,'' she wrote on the intentional emptiness, the
silence, in the work of such modern artists as Cage and
Beckett, and she admired their ability to ''jettison''
''the inherited anguish and complexity of this
civilization.'' Even her arguments for formalist criticism
assumed that one could approach a work of art free from
preconceptions.

In her own life, certainly, Miss Sontag has traveled a long
way from her rootless childhood in Arizona and California,
the daughter of a traveling salesman and a teacher. And she
has traveled quickly - college at 15, marriage at 17,
teaching at 20 - but she says that she is still trying to
''create'' herself. She is at work on a novel, and after
directing a play in Italy this winter, plans to teach two
small seminars at the New School. ''I feel restless,'' she
says. ''I'm always trying to move on, and when I bring a
book out, I want it to be done, over, so I can do something
different. I feel that my best work is ahead of me.''